Sunday, March 5, 2017

DCS: AJS37 Viggen (Beta) - Naval Strike

Mission for today: locate and destroy a Russian Neutrashimyy-class frigate that is interfering with the deployment of special operations forces aboard HMS Vigilant.

Loadout: 2 x Rb15f anti-ship missiles, 2 x Rb74 air to air missiles. Target area: 1 km off the coast of Abkhazia, in the proximity of the Sukhumi airport.

Last check before taking off.

Stage 3 afterburner, the Viggen pushes the runway down to the depths of irrelevance. Me and the beast, unleashed.

Did you know? A common mistake of virtual Viggen pilots is to retrieve the landing gear too soon. By doing this, the flaps are raised at a relatively low speed, accompanied by a severe loss of lift.

Turning onto waypoint B2. By this time I have my anti-ship missiles ready, and I start a climb to get a better radar view of the sea. I need a target, snart!

Note: in the previous screenshot, the circle symbol in the radar display is the location of the active waypoint. The dark areas are land and the lighter ones is the Black Sea.

There it is! Time to get busy setting up the Rb15f's targeting.

The target is that tiny dark speckle at 2 o'clock. At the time of the screenshot above I'm still flying over land and some hills are obscuring the shore line east of the Russian frigate.

Now that I found the target, I am ready to set Bx8, the markpoint for the target area.

I move the radar cursor over the target and set Bx8.

By setting up Bx8 without any previous input, the Bx6 (point at which the missile will descent to sea-skimming level) and Bx7 (point at which the missile will turn into the target) are created automatically at strange places. A better way is to set it up is to convert a regular navigation waypoint into an attack point. By doing so, the automatic generation of Bx6 and Bx7 is started from that attack point. For more details, please check the magnificent Chuck's guide. Or set up Bx6 and Bx7 with the mission editor.

And, yes, I had to trace back my steps to find the cursor around the automatically-generated Bx7.

The Viggen's radar does not have an indicator on where the cursor is, but the active mark point is a good start on where to look. I still have not mastered the art to move the cursor back to the front of my position without seeing it.

Weapons released!

1,106 km/h of pure awesomeness. If only I could fly so low and so fast.

The point defense system of the frigate has tried to shoot down my right missile, which turns, evades and re-engages.

And the right missile gets destroyed, a few dozen meters short of its target! But the distraction generated by it allows the left missile to score a hit.